By Lorne Gunter, For The Calgary Herald
September 19, 2009Comments (47)

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?

Or if Don Cherry claimed suddenly to like European hockey players who wear visors and float around the ice, never bodychecking opponents.

Or Jack Layton insisted that unions are ruining the economy by distorting wages and protecting unproductive workers.

Or Stephen Harper began arguing that it makes good economic sense for Ottawa to own a car company. (Oh, wait, that one happened.) But at least, the Tories-buy-GM aberration made all the papers and newscasts.

When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.

"How much?" he wondered before the assembled delegates. "The jury is still out."

He has supported a purposeful UN and EU fallacy all of these years in hopes of gaining some sort of international recognition and it hasn't happened so now he swings the other way looking for recognition as an enlightened scientist by virtue of the facts before all of our eyes .

By now most enlightened thinking people have made up their minds that global warming is and always was a joke.The whole scam was just to slow down America and remove her from the global economy and that hasn't happened .Now that the World economy is in such Chaos the Warming crap is without any rational purpose.

09-22-2009, 04:37 PM

FlaGator

Cue wilbur...

09-22-2009, 04:42 PM

megimoo

Quote:

Originally Posted by FlaGator

Cue wilbur...

Wilbur is a keynote speaker at the UK Gay/Lesbian/Atheist convention this week !

09-22-2009, 08:23 PM

PoliCon

BLASPHEMER!! The Goracle will strick him down for sure!!!!11!!1!!1!!!!!!

Thanks to Ginger for reposting yet another example of a half-told "science" story that - surprise, surprise - invented controversy where there is none.

If one thinks what Latif said is a paradigm shift, or about face from scientists... well... you've proved that you havent honestly investigated the theory at all. Its always funny how everyone claims to have "researched" the theory and come to an independent conclusion... but don't even comprehend the most basic of facts about the theory.

Quote:

Latif begins the section of his presentation misrepresented by Pearce by confirming that the media incorrectly believes that global warming is monotonic- something that we know the warming is decidedly not; something not claimed by “climate science” or “climate scientists”. Significant natural variability is superimposed on the long term man-made warming trend. Although the press might expect for us to set a new temperature record every year, the existence of natural variability means that we could in theory wait a long time (~17 years) before setting a new temperature record. Latif imagines ‘what if’:

Quote:

It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two- you know- when the temperature cools- alright- relative to the present level- alright?

And then- you know- I know what’s going to happen -you know? I will get- you know- millions of phone calls- you know:

So- you kn0w- and therefore this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.

This was not an explicit prediction by Latif- it was a hypothetical scenario that is a real, if not necessarily likely, possibility. Latif is saying that because people don’t understand that global warming isn’t supposed to be monotonic, and that there could be periods where temperatures pause or even dip below the present, the media and/or public will incorrectly believe that global warming has stopped/was wrong/etc. even though such “pauses” in warming are decidedly not contrary to our understanding of the climate system and how we anticipate it will respond to emissions driven warming.

Of course this is like cat nip to the denialists and their fellow travelers like Roger Pielke Jr. It feeds into the caricature, enabled by sloppy journalism, that nearly everything can happen because of global warming [often phrased, "Global warming, is there anything it can't do?" Sometimes with 'global warming' stricken out and replaced with 'climate change'].

Latif goes on to describe a number of phenomena that have an overall trend but are dominated on the interannual and even decadal scales by natural variability: Sahel rainfall, Atlantic tropical cyclones, regional sea levels. Again, none of this is new, none of it was presented as new. This represents no paradigm shift within climate science.